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The star of “Winter’s Bone,” a moody mystery set in the Ozarks which just won the top prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is a 19-year-old actress from Kentucky named Jennifer Lawrence. She was discovered while still in junior high and has since dedicated most of her waking hours to building a film career, which meant abbreviating high school and skipping college.

“I’ve had a career since I was 14, I pay my own rent, I live on my own, and I’m not going to have a lot in common with somebody who’s my age,” she says. “And I know I sound like a jerk, but what are we going to talk about? Prom? I didn’t go to prom. Or your boyfriend? I’m working — all the time.”

The talent agent who discovered the tweenage Lawrence in New York stopped her on the street and asked to take her picture. “I didn’t know that kind of thing was creepy,” recalls Lawrence, who was visiting the city for the first time with her mother. “Then I went into the agency and did a cold read for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial. They told me it was the best cold read they’d ever seen from a 14-year-old. My mom told me they were lying.”

Lawrence now lives in Santa Monica, after keeping an apartment in New York for five years. For someone who’s too young to rent a car, she can sound a bit jaded, saying things like, “Of course, the way my life goes, as soon as I sold my apartment, I got a job working in New York.” (That job was a supporting role in “The Beaver,” an upcoming comedy with Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster.) For fun, Lawrence paints, mostly with acrylics. “I’m going through a woman phase right now. I just paint a lot of naked women,” she says. “My mom thinks I’m a lesbian.”

Lawrence is rosy-cheeked and fresh-faced, but when her big blue eyes are cast downward, she can look like she’s lived through the Flood. Directors like Debra Granik of “Winter’s Bone” have found this feature useful. In “The Burning Plain,” the directorial debut of Guillermo Arriaga (the pen behind “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams”), Lawrence’s character kills birds with a slingshot and burns scars into her boyfriend’s arm. “If you see any movie that I’m in, you’ll want to cut yourself,” she says. “These are very dark roles. So when people see the movies, they don’t think it makes sense that I grew up in Kentucky, and my parents are still married and they love each other. But I’m the least dramatic person you’ll ever meet.”